Introduction

First introduced last March, the GeForce 7600 GT is the spiritual successor to two of NVIDIA’s most popular GPUs: the GeForce 6600 GT and before it, the GeForce4 Ti 4200. Like the aforementioned graphics processors, the 7600 GT is designed to deliver the absolute best bang for the buck: all three were introduced with a $200 MSRP, although in each case NVIDIA took a different path to get there.

In the case of the GeForce 7600 GT, a quick and dirty analogy for the GPU is that it’s half a GeForce 7900 GT. Its G73 GPU has half the pixel shaders as GeForce 7900 GT (12 versus 24), half the ROPS (8 versus 16), and half the memory interface (128-bit versus 256-bit). Essentially the only portion of the GeForce 7600 GT that isn’t sliced in half are the vertex shaders. NVIDIA equips the GeForce 7600 GT with five vertex units, whereas the GeForce 7900 GT has eight. NVIDIA even integrates one dual-link DVI transmitter into the GeForce 7600 GT, while the 7900 family has two dual-link DVI ports.

GeForce 7600 GT AGP

The XFX 7600 GT AGP and GeForce 6600 GT AGP

To keep performance up however, the GeForce 7600 GT runs at very high clock speeds. The graphics core runs at 560MHz, that’s over 100MHz higher than 7900 GT and 160MHz faster than GeForce 6600 GT, while its memory runs at an even 700MHz, yielding up to 22.4GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth. That’s a little over half the bandwidth of a GeForce 7900 GT, and 6.4GB/sec more than GeForce 6600 GT.

In our testing we’ve found that the GeForce 7600 GT delivers more performance than NVIDIA’s former flagship GeForce 6800 Ultra, all in a single-slot package that runs efficiently.

Because of these attributes, AGP users have been hoping for a GeForce 7600 GT AGP card. For months it looked like NVIDIA wouldn’t comply, but then in May a leaked set of beta ForceWare drivers contained support for the GeForce 7600 GS AGP. Then, around late August/early September, the first GeForce 7600 GS AGP boards quietly hit store shelves. At the time NVIDIA was actively promoting the launch of the GeForce 7900 GS/7950 GT, so the arrival of the GeForce 7600 GS AGP was hardly noticed by most sites. The GeForce 7600 GT AGP then followed a few months later at the very end of 2006. So why the delay in bringing these GPUs to AGP?

GeForce 7600 GT AGP and 7600 GT PCI Express

GeForce 7600 GT AGP and Radeon X850 XT PE AGP

To be honest, NVIDIA really hasn’t directly answered that question. It’s widely believed though that NVIDIA’s haste stemmed more as a result of the competition than anything else: right around the time the GeForce 7600 GS AGP magically appeared, ATI released a slew of AGP-based Radeon X1600 cards.

Unlike NVIDIA’s previous AGP entrant, the GeForce 7800 GS AGP, the GeForce 7600 GS and 7600 GT AGP are a direct translation of their PCI Express counterparts. This means that none of the pixel or vertex shading units are disabled from the factory by NVIDIA and the clock speeds also carry over unchanged, in fact many of NVIDIA’s board partners are factory overclocking their GeForce 7600 AGP cards, the XFX GeForce 7600 GT 580M AGP we’re reviewing today is one such example of this. Let’s take a closer look at the card!